ion to travel would reawaken in him
(without his remembering that this particular tour was impossible) and
would be realised. One night he dreamed that he was going away for a
year; leaning from the window of the train towards a young man on the
platform who wept as he bade him farewell, he was seeking to persuade
this young man to come away also. The train began to move; he awoke
in alarm, and remembered that he was not going away, that he would see
Odette that evening, and next day and almost every day. And then, being
still deeply moved by his dream, he would thank heaven for those special
circumstances which made him independent, thanks to which he could
remain in Odette's vicinity, and could even succeed in making her allow
him to see her sometimes; and, counting over the list of his advantages:
his social position--his fortune, from which she stood too often in
need of assistance not to shrink from the prospect of a definite rupture
(having even, so people said, an ulterior plan of getting him to marry
her)--his friendship with M. de Charlus, which, it must be confessed,
had never won him any very great favour from Odette, but which gave him
the pleasant feeling that she was always hearing complimentary things
said about him by this common friend for whom she had so great an
esteem--and even his own intelligence, the whole of which he employed in
weaving, every day, a fresh plot which would make his presence, if not
agreeable, at any rate necessary to Odette--he thought of what might
have happened to him if all these advantages had been lacking, he
thought that, if he had been, like so many other men, poor and humble,
without resources, forced to undertake any task that might be offered to
him, or tied down by parents or by a wife, he might have been obliged
to part from Odette, that that dream, the terror of which was still so
recent, might well have been true; and he said to himself: "People don't
know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they
are." But he reflected that this existence had lasted already for
several years, that all that he could now hope for was that it should
last for ever, that he would sacrifice his work, his pleasures, his
friends, in fact the whole of his life to the daily expectation of a
meeting which, when it occurred, would bring him no happiness; and he
asked himself whether he was not mistaken, whether the circumstances
that had favoured their relations and had pr